Foresight Update 1

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Interview:
K. Eric Drexler

FI: What led to your work on nanotechnology?

Drexler: For many years I'd been concerned about
technology and the future, and had been looking at what could be
built with tools that we didn't have yet. My work at MIT had
focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive
space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this
led to various sorts of work in space development.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in
science and technology, including the work in molecular biology,
genetic engineering, and so forth. I had been impressed by the
fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and
that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
This got me thinking about what sorts of things we could build
when we got good at designing molecules. And this led pretty
rapidly to the idea of self-assembling systems of molecules that
could act as molecular machines--and the idea of molecular
machines that could build other molecular machines. This was in
the spring of 1977.

FI: This was the assembler idea?

Drexler: The assembler, yes, but the name came
later. After realizing that we would eventually be able to build
molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any
pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences
followed from that. It began to look like one of the most
important developments that we'd face in our future. And concern
with this began to absorb more and more of my time.

It began to look like one
of the most important developments that we'd face in our
future.

FI: How do you think we're going to get to
nanotechnology?

Drexler: Well, it's hard to say. It's a lot
easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits
of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But
it's much harder to see just what path we will follow in heading
toward those limits. It's like the difference between seeing
mountains in the distance and knowing that there must be some way
of reaching them and trying to figure out just what the easiest
path to follow will be, as you cross a jumbled landscape of
rivers and cliffs and underbrush between here and there.

At present, some areas of research that are leading in the
direction of nanotechnology include protein engineering, other
sorts of biochemical engineering, the beginnings of a
micromanipulator technology growing out of the technology of the
scanning tunneling microscope, and also more conventional sorts
of chemistry. Which of these will in fact play the greater role
is hard to say, and it may well be that all of them will play a
role in the path that's eventually followed.

FI: Why do you emphasize the protein engineering
path in your book and talks, rather than these other paths?

Drexler: Well, there are several reasons. In
thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is
understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like
after we reach the assembler breakthrough. But how we get to
nanotechnology--what the intermediate technologies are, the
enabling technologies--will make essentially no difference in
what nanotechnology itself is like.

An analogy I like to use is that the shape of the wings and the
composition of the aluminum in a 747 jet doesn't depend on the
shape of the wings and the kind of cloth that was used in the
Wright Flyer. The Wright brothers set us on the path to modern
aircraft, but what we build today depends on technology
today--our design abilities, the quality of our tools, and the
materials we have to work with. Likewise nanotechnology will,
once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our
ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there.

So what's important right now is to understand that there are
steps that lead to this new place. Protein engineering is not
only a promising path, but it provides a very compact and (I
think) persuasive argument for being able to build molecular
machines, because proteins are molecular machines. We already see
them serving the range of functions that are needed. That's not
true for conventional chemistry or scanning tunneling microscope
technology. They're not starting out as a technology of molecular
machines, so they don't make such a neat case for nanotechnology.

FI: Aren't there also advantages in using that
analogy because protein engineering is a form of
biotechnology--something that people know should go ahead, but
that they know has some risk? Is that another reason to emphasize
this path, because it gets people thinking along the right lines?

Drexler: Yes, I think that makes sense. And
again what that points to is the greater similarity between
protein systems and real nanotechnology than between other
enabling technologies and nanotechnology. Protein engineering is
a technology of molecular machines--of molecular machines that
are part of replicators--and so it comes from an area that
already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

FI: What do you think of the rate of progress
toward nanotechnology?

Drexler: I'm impressed by the rate of progress.
It's as fast or even a little faster than I had been expecting
when I first published a paper
on assemblers back in 1981. How fast it will move in the
future is very hard to say, but we're clearly on the path to
nanotechnology, indeed on several different paths to
nanotechnology. An international race in the relevant
technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily
with an understanding of where that race leads in the long run,
but strongly motivated by the short-term payoffs.

High Ambition

Private
Launches?

Two possible drawbacks to space technologies are additions to
the burden of government spending and pollution from rocket
exhaust. The American Rocket Company of Camarillo, CA, is
tackling both. As a privately funded company, AMROC has developed
its engines without federal investment. Further, their hybrid
rocket engines--using solid fuel and liquid oxidizer--are
environmentally cleaner than the Space Shuttle (important when
launch rates become high). Hybrids are also incapable of a
Shuttle-style explosion. AMROC is now testing full-scale engines
at Edwards Air Force base.

New
Biostasis Facility

The ALCOR Life Extension
Foundation officially opened its new research and patient
care facility in Riverside, California over Memorial Day weekend.
Its 5000 square feet include an operating room, laboratory area,
staff sleeping quarters, X-ray room, conference room, loft
storage area, and patient care facilities. All elements of the
facility, from the walls to the roof to glassware storage
shelves, were designed to survive a massive earthquake.

The building was open for public inspection on May 24. Also on
view was ALCOR's modular ambulance outfitted with the newly
deployed Mobile Advanced Life Support Unit. For more information,
call 714-736-1703

Clippings
Invited

If you find information and clippings of relevance to FI's
goal of preparing for future technologies, please forward them to
us for possible coverage in FI Update. Letters and opinion pieces
will also be considered; submissions become the property of the
Foresight Institute and may be edited. Write to the Foresight
Institute, Box 61058, Palo Alto, CA 94306

Provides a general overview of molecular machines and assemblers
from a mechanical engineering viewpoint, briefly sketching
applications to space systems.

Molecular structures of probe and gate knobs with
attached carbyne rods, for use in the transistor-like
"locks of mechanical nanocomputers. From illustrations
in "Rod Logic and Thermal Noise in the Mechanical
Nanocomputer"

"Rod Logic and Thermal Noise in the Mechanical
Nanocomputer," K. Eric Drexler. Proceedings of the
Third International Symposium on Molecular Electronic Devices,
Forrest Carter (ed.), Elsevier North Holland, in press.

Sketches various approaches to nanotechnology (protein
engineering, synthetic chemistry, micromanipulators), then
focuses on the fundamental elements of mechanical nanocomputers:
wire-like signal transmission rods and transistor-like mechanical
locks. Describes the structure and mechanical properties of these
moving parts and derives estimates for friction and energy loss
resulting from rod motions. Finally models and analyzes the
effects of thermal noise, leading to the description of a rod
design which yields an overall error rate of less than one in a
trillion logic operations.

Logic speeds are consistent with a gigahertz system clock;
devices sizes are consistent with volumes on the order of a
thousandth of a cubic micron per CPU.

For an extended discussion of the topic of the above
paper, see chapter 12 of Nanosystems.

Information
Available

David Forrest of the MIT NSG has prepared an information
packet, entitled "Nanotechnology Press Kit," which we
understand is available to anyone on request from the MIT News
Office, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139. It includes
four short essays and a list of audio cassettes available on the
topic.

Books
of Note

Proceedings of the Third International Symposium
on Molecular Electronic Devices,
Forrest Carter (ed.), Elsevier North Holland, in press. A
collection of technical papers on molecular electronics and
subjects more-or-less related to it. Few relate directly to the
construction of molecular circuits or computers.

The Blind Watchmaker,Richard Dawkins,
Norton, 1986. A lively and readable account of biological
evolution--of the amazing complexity of living things and of how
this complexity can be explained. Covers modern debates on
evolution from the perspective of a prominent participant.

Engines of Creation,K. Eric Drexler, Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1986. Describes what nanotechnology is and what
it will mean to medicine, economics, the arms race, and much
else. The book that introduced the subject.

Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and
William Ury, Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Suggests ways to improve
negotiations, making them faster, fairer, more productive, and
less disruptive, by focusing on principles rather than positions.
Good memes to share among people working together to get things
done.

The Tomorrow Makers, Grant Fjermedal,
Macmillan, 1986. An account of the frontiers of robotics,
artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology told through
interviews with leaders in these fields. Focuses on the wild
human possibilities of the coming revolutions in technology.

The Society of Mind, Marvin
Minsky, Simon and Schuster, 1986. An interwoven collection of
ideas on thinking. Describes the mind as an intelligent system
made up of less intelligent parts, themselves made of still
simpler parts. Deals with a higher level of organization than
simple neural networks.

Parallel Distributed Processing, Volume
One, David Rumelhart, James McClelland, et al., MIT Press, 1986.
A good, technical introduction to recent work in neural-style
computation. Describes general features of these models, specific
approaches, and the results of a range of experiments on learning
in neural networks.